Surveys are one of the most popular methods of obtaining business intelligence. For example, customers' preferences, pain points and future intent are some of the common forms of business intelligence gathered using surveys. Gathering business intelligence using surveys typically consists of several steps, sometimes referred to as: “Goal”, “Who”, “What”, “How” and “Analysis”.
The “Goal” step defines the goals of the survey (what is to be learnt from the survey exercise), the “Who” step defines who is going to be asked to provide feedback, the “What” step involves creating a set of questions, the “How” step defines the presentation and administration of the survey. The “Analysis” step defines what would be done to the responses to obtain business intelligence.
Measurement errors in surveys are deviations of the respondents' answers from their true value on the measure. For “online” surveys, and more particularly those offered or administered via the World Wide Web, there are two main sources of measurement errors, which stem from the Web questionnaire itself.
The first source of error is the wording of the questions or the flow of the questionnaire that can both have an effect on the quality of respondents' answers. The second source of error is the questionnaire form, (that is, the visual layout of the questionnaire), which is of particular importance in self-administered surveys. These aspects have been studied in detail in the socio-psychological field, with the emphasis on developing certain guidelines or heuristics that can be used to design “better” survey presentations, that is, presentations that lead to a smaller measurement error. A need clearly exists for an improved method of assessing survey presentations.